Race Report

At the Red Hook Crit, a Russian Bike Messenger Wins Again

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(Photo by Donalrey Nieva)

AT 10:30 ON A SATURDAY NIGHT it's not unusual to find a crowd of hiply dressed people in their 20s milling about an art gallery in Brooklyn. What’s maybe a bit odd is to see, amidst an array of contemporary paintings and sculptures, a man dressed in bib shorts and a sleeveless base layer spinning the pedals of a track bike on rollers.

This weekend, that's what was on display at the Kidd Yellin Gallery in the Red Hook neighborhood of Brooklyn. It served as headquarters for the fourth annual Red Hook Criterium.

There was concern the unseasonably frigid temps would hurt attendance for this year's event, but one look at the massive jumble of bikes in the gallery's entryway made it clear that the Big Apple tifosi would not let a little thing like the prospect of frostbite get in the way of seeing this bike race.

True to the spirit of the Red Hook Crit, the crowd in the gallery was a cross section of the city’s two-wheeled world, with pierced and dreadlocked messengers rubbing elbows with their more clean-scrubbed roadie counterparts. The common denominator: a love of bikes, and an appreciation for the skill and daring of the racers soon to be doing their thing.

Race almost a no-go

Much of the pre-race buzz was about a last-minute course change. The three previous editions of the Red Hook Crit took place on neighborhood streets, with marshals controlling car and bus traffic at each corner. Racing on the city streets made for exciting action and added an illicit thrill, but the threat of the police shutting the race down always hung ominously over the proceedings.

To go more legit, Red Hook organizers sought a permit to close the streets to traffic for the 2011 edition. When the request was denied, the race was perilously close to being canceled. At the 11th hour a deal was struck with the New York City Economic Development Corporation to hold the race on the grounds of the Brooklyn Cruise Terminal, a massive complex of piers in Red Hook that is most famous as the New York home of the luxury ocean liner Queen Mary 2.

Gone would be the cobblestones and potholes, but other than that everything would be the same: track bikes only, and first across the line after 20 laps around a three-quarter-mile course would be the winner.

After some reconnaissance of the new course, the winner of the 2010 Red Hook Crit, Dan Chabanov, a New York bike messenger and a native of Russia, declared it "ridiculous." With the wind whipping off New York Harbor from the west, Chabanov said one section was going to be like "doing a hill climb 20 times."

"This will not end in a bunch sprint," he added as he dashed off to warm up.

Riders ready

As the 11 p.m. start drew near, Red Hook's founder and chief organizer, David Trimble, took the top step of the podium inside the gallery and gave the riders their final instructions, exhorting them to race safely above all else.

Racers and spectators made their way to the course, orderly squeezing through a gate in the barbwire-topped fencing surrounding the cruise terminal. Participants took two neutral laps around the course to get familiar with traversing it in a large group, then stopped at the start-finish for call-ups to the front row.

In any short, fast race with a large field, there's a huge advantage to starting at the front and not having to burn extra energy to move up to the leaders. This fact becomes even more glaring at Red Hook, though, because on a singlespeed track bike you have no chance to change gears. So your speed is limited to how fast you can spin your legs.

And with call-ups given to previous podium finishers and other super-fast folks, those in the second half of the field could pretty much kiss their chances of a high finish good-bye before they even clipped in to their pedals. Not that that would stop anyone. After all, racing Red Hook means enjoying the experience, the thrill, and the fun.